Monday, August 14, 2017

“It is not the strongest or most intelligent who will
survive, but those who can best manage change.”

Leon
C. Megginson (1921-)

Author:
Small Business Management

The need to adapt is universal.
As a board member of the Mentoring Corps for Community Development (MCCD) in
Old Lyme, CT, I have been witness to the effects of state budget cut-backs on nonprofit
organizations that help those with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“Attention must be paid,”
said Linda Loman about her husband Willy. She was speaking to her sons about
the despair of their father’s life, as it was nearing its end. Attention must
also be paid to thousands of eleemosynary institutions around the country, as
state budgets are being strained, principally from demands by public employee
unions for wages and benefits. While I write about eastern Connecticut, the
problem, is nationwide.

“Nonprofits throughout the state,”
according to an article in the New Haven Register on July 4, 2017, “have been told to plan for budget cuts of
10% or more.” The State of Connecticut is not alone in fiscal
mismanagement, but it has been more egregious than most. It is the nation’s
wealthiest by per-capita income and by assets per resident, yet more than 12%
of its population is on food stamps. Connecticut has the second highest state
debt per capita and as a percent of GDP. Its deficit, estimated at $1.5 billion
over the next three years, is among the highest relative to its budget and
population. It is unfriendly to business. It is understandable why Connecticut
is experiencing out-migration, especially among the wealthy.

The crisis for nonprofits, alluded to in the Register, should provoke a
debate as to the purposes and priorities of spending by the State. Revenues are
supposed to help pay for schools and support state universities and community
colleges. They build roads, bridges and tunnels. They pay for state police and
fund the national guard. They operate prisons and courts, and they supervise
and maintain parks, harbors, wetlands and forests. But, when one looks at the
budget, it is hard not to conclude that Connecticut’s spending is largely to pay
for the approximately 50,000 employees, plus retirees. (The State ranks near
the top of the list in terms of compensation per state employee and in number
of state employees per 100,000 population.) Approximately 55% of Connecticut’s
budget goes to pay employee salaries, benefits, and retiree health and pension programs.

Over the years, Connecticut’s budget has been squeezed, as the
population declined[1]
and as some businesses vacated the state, and as other responsibilities,
including programs to help those with disabilities, were assumed. In the
meantime, retirement benefits, along with entitlements – welfare, Medicaid, unemployment
compensation, food stamps – kept expanding. Prudence is needed.

Forced by budget constraints, Connecticut has had to make tough
choices, as the article in the New Haven Register explained. The unpleasant
fact is that the governor and legislature have abetted the politically
connected, and let the axe fall on those with less influence – including those
with intellectual and developmental disabilities. However, it is not the purpose
of this essay to find guilt, but to explain that the State’s spending constraints
are a reality for those in the nonprofit world, and to offer possible solutions.

In the New Haven Register’s article cited above, Ken Dixon
quotes Gian-Carl Casa, president and CEO of the Connecticut Community Nonprofit
Alliance: “There are devastating funding
cuts to community-based providers. We continue to believe that budget solutions
should be long term and include conversion of state services to the community,
where $300 million can be saved over the next five years and used to prevent damaging
cuts.” Perhaps. Maybe communities can save the day, but many local
governments are under pressure, especially those in poorer parts of the state,
like southeastern Connecticut.

The question facing nonprofits is what to do given this dismal state of
affairs? Each year the situation worsens – demand for services expands, while revenues
shrink. Options, apart from reducing expenses, are limited – and much of the
cost-cutting has already been done. In eastern Connecticut, approximately
10,000 residents suffer from intellectual and developmental disabilities. They
are served by multiple nonprofits – ten or twelve large ones and a dozen or
more smaller ones. Another (estimated) 5,000 individuals in need are either not
served or underserved. Each organization has its own director and staff, along
with an independent board of directors. Thus, one possibility is consolidation.
While mergers would make many of these nonprofits more efficient by
streamlining programs and reducing administrative costs, there are,
understandably, advantages to being independent and “local.”

Other choices include becoming more aggressive writers of grants. As
well, they might expand efforts to find individual donors, but that activity is
crowded. (Though, it is my belief that generosity is deeply embedded in
American culture.) It is possible there are funds within towns and cities that
could be tapped, but most municipal budgets have little flexibility. It is even
possible that funds from other state departments may be accessed, but I suspect
those sources are pinched as well.

One path we at MCCD have pursued, in working with a few of these organizations,
in helping set up up for-profit businesses – bakeries, the manufacture of
soaps, lawn services, and the like – within the nonprofit organization. All
profits, obviously, accrue to the nonprofit. Such actions reflect a “can-do,” entrepreneurial
spirit on the part of the nonprofit, which brings the advantages of self-sufficiency
and independence to their boards, staffs and clients. Many of the latter work
in those businesses.

Change happens. We adapt or we die. In contravention of my earlier
promise to keep this essay apolitical, allow me to vent: I am incensed by the
unconscionable cynicism of politicians who have, because of profligacy and
promises to unions, put their most challenged constituents at risk. And I am disheartened
by voters who refuse to challenge them.

Attention must be paid; facts must be faced, and decisions will have to
be made. In The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia, book six), C.S.
Lewis wrote, “Crying is all right in its
way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you will
have to decide what to do.” Lewis’
book was written for youngsters, but his message is for all ages, especially politicians,
the voters they represent and operators of state-funded nonprofits. If you
cannot be all things for all people (and most of us cannot), needs must be
prioritized, values must be considered and decisions must be made. The lesson
as I see it – accept change, and distance your nonprofit organizations,
wherever and whenever possible, from the enticing but entangling, amoral arms
of government.

[1]The Census Bureau reported last December that
Connecticut’s population has declined three years in a row, at an accelerating
rate.

A late spring day a few years
ago: The car in front of me has stopped. I am on Neck Road, a hundred yards
north of Smith Neck Road in Old Lyme. The woman who had been driving is
standing outside her car. On the side of the road, a fawn stands on three legs
– the fourth dangling uselessly and painfully. It is the mother deer, the doe,
that grips my attention. She stands helplessly, a few yards away, unable to do
anything. Instinct (and devotion?) would not let her seek safety. Mothers are
mothers, no matter the species.

Obviously, I have no first-hand knowledge of motherhood, but I have a
lot of second-hand knowledge. I am the grandson of two mothers, the son of a
mother, husband to a mother, brother to four sisters who are mothers, father to
a daughter who is a mother, and father-in-law to two daughters-in-law who are
mothers. I have six granddaughters who I pray will be able to become mothers. As
a child growing up with horses, goats, chickens, dogs and cats, I have been
witness to innumerable births. As an adult, we had a goat give birth to two
kids and cats that had kittens. Like many, I have witnessed mothers in the wild.
Motherhood is a marvel to watch, as natural and as old as life itself.

“But first and foremost, I
remember Mama.” That is the opening sentence of Katrin Hanson’s book, Mama
and the Hospital, and the closing line of the movie, “I remember Mama.” For
those of us of a certain age, Irene Dunne, as Marta Hanson, epitomized
motherhood. She played Mama, the mother of a poor, immigrant, Norwegian family
in 1910 San Francisco. She was the glue that held the family together. As
viewers, we identified with this hard-working, devoted woman who so adored her
children that she once got a job mopping floors in a hospital, so she could
visit her child who was recovering.

Mothers abound in literature, and not all are good ones. Remember Medea
who skewers her child because her husband Jason wants to take a new wife, or Prince
Hamlet’s mother Gertrude who marries her husband’s killer, King Hamlet’s
brother Claudius? Or what about Joan Crawford as depicted by her stepdaughter
Christine, in her memoir, Mommie Dearest? But many mothers in literature
are good. Recall the Biblical story of the two harlots, and how Solomon
discerned the right mother? There is Mary, mother of Jesus, and Hester Prynne,
heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter. We read of the
socially clumsy Mrs. Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Scarlett
O’Hara who was torn between her real mother and her Mammy in Gone with the Wind,
a subject Kathryn Stockett wrote of decades later in The Help.

The most tortured mother in literature, in my reading, was Sophie
Zawistowski, the eponymous heroine of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice.
Sophie, with her two young children, as we learn toward the end of the novel,
had been years before confronted by an SS officer at Auschwitz who demanded: “You may keep one of your children. The other
one will have to go. Which one will you keep?”

It is often said that men marry women like their mother. People who
knew my mother and know my wife would be unable to see the similarities, except
in one important way – both raised happy and successful children. My children,
in my unbiased opinion, were especially fortunate in their mother.

Today, in America, and in most democracies, we are treated as equals,
regardless of religion, race, heritage or sex. Such treatment is as it should
be, equitable and civil. But, we must not to muddle what makes us individuals –
our physical, mental and emotional characteristics. Tolerance and respect are
critical to civility, and that means tolerating and respecting our differences.
With emphasis on sameness, we should not lose sight that it is our differences that
allow us to become who we are and to evolve as a species.

One of the biggest differences between females and males is the instinct
a mother has for the child she has borne. Males have no such aptitude. As Karen
Rinaldi recently wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times, fathers
sometimes complain about having to “babysit” their children. However, she notes:
“Has a woman ever ‘babysat’ her own
children?” It is not that as fathers we do not love our children. We do.
But we cannot have the same sense as does a mother when she first clutches to
her breast a living, breathing being that moments before had been in her womb. That
knack is not exclusive to man. We see it in the bitch as she licks clean her
new-born pups, and in the mare as she gently helps her new-born foal to her
feet. It is not cruelty when a mother bird nudges her young out of the nest to
test her or his wings. Even instincts that we might see as barbarous are
usually acts of survival – chickens will sometimes eat eggs whose shells are
deficient in calcium, and polar bears will sometimes kill and devour the
smallest of their young. A friend who has a farm in Provence recently told me
that his goose, who hatched two goslings (when one is typical), was not overly
wrought when a hawk took away the smallest.

Love for a newborn is eternal, even among the haughty who conceal their
emotions. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens wrote of Lady Dedlock when she
first realizes that the little girl she thought had died in her first moments
was alive: “O my child, my child! Not
dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me; but sternly
nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, my child!”

Being mothers has not impeded women from careers. History is replete
with women who have done both: Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, Julia Ward Howe,
Marie Curie, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Indira Gandhi. Far more have careers
today: Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley, J.K. Rowling, Sheryl Sandberg and my
daughter-in-law, the author Beatriz Williams. In fact, today’s labor
participation rate is higher for mothers (70.5%) than for the workforce as a
whole (62.8%). Nevertheless, motherhood takes effort and time. It takes an
understanding of needs of newborns to grow, to fledge, to swim on their own, to
feed, to fear predators. In humans, mothers are the first responders in loving
and nourishing their children to become productive, responsible citizens who
will, in time, love and nourish their own children.

In some quarters, the concept of motherhood is under attack, or, at
least, not being accorded the respect it deserves. Over the past several
decades, young people in Western societies have delayed marriage and children. Getting
a good education, starting a career, financial independence and the desire to
prove one’s independence – all valid explanations – are cited as reasons women
choose to delay childbirth. The consequences, in developed nations, have been
birth rates below what is necessary to sustain population, without immigration.
Ironically, it is in poor nations – those that can least afford children – that
childbirths are above replacement rates.

Since Thomas Malthus, in the late 18th Century, warned that
population growth was exceeding agriculture’s ability to sustain it,
Cassandra’s have repeatedly warned that the planet is overcrowded. For over two
hundred years those doomsayers have been proved wrong. Will they be right at
some point? Perhaps. But what economists and prophets ignore is the creativity
and industriousness of men and women – how productive they have made the land
we till, and how innovation has made our lives more comfortable, including the
ability to plan families. This is not to suggest we should disregard the limits
of nature’s resources. We should not. But we must acknowledge our abilities to conceive,
create and adapt. Conception, keep in mind, is the ultimate expression of
optimism.

In the Times article quoted above, Karen Rinaldi, an author and founder
of the Harper Wave imprint of Harper Collins, wrote, “Motherhood is not a sacrifice, but a privilege.” I agree, but it is
more. In passing one’s genes to the next generation, motherhood may be selfish,
as Ms. Rinaldi asserted, but that is not the thought I would have had, and “privilege” is not the only word I would
have used to describe motherhood. In my opinion, birth is a blessing of divine
proportions. When we consider the odds against being born – the right sperm and
the right egg at the right time – it is as much a miracle as a physical happening.
Science has made giving birth safer and easier, but it has neither altered the
process nor changed the consequence. Motherhood is also a duty. Without it, we
would become extinct.

Motherhood, as my wife reminds me, is above all an emotional challenge.
Good mothers understand the awesome responsibility that is theirs – that, in
bringing into the world a new life, they must ensure that the baby they bore,
the child they reared, the teenager they argued with and advised, becomes a
self-sufficient, caring, respectful, responsible and productive adult. Motherhood
is unlike any other experience. There is nothing that equals it in importance.
Donald Trump may be leader of the free world. Xi Jinping may be president of
the world’s most populous country. Bill Gates may have more money than anyone. Wernher
von Braun may have developed the mathematical models that helped put man on the
moon. Elon Musk may build a New Hyperloop allowing one to travel between New
York and Washington in 29 minutes. But none could bear a baby. None can create
the future. None can claim motherhood – a miraculous privilege, duty and
responsibility, critical to all species.